Theory Beyond Structure and Agency: Introducing the Metric/Nonmetric Distinction

By Jean-Sébastien Guy

This book offers a solution for the problem of structure and agency in sociological theory by developing a new pair of fundamental concepts: metric and nonmetric. Nonmetric forms, arising in a crowd made out of innumerable individuals, correspond to social groups that divide the many individuals in the crowd into insiders and outsiders. Metric forms correspond to congested zones like traffic jams on a highway: individuals are constantly entering and leaving these zones so that they continue to exist, even though the individuals passing through them change. Building from these concepts, we can understand “agency” as a requirement for group identity and group membership, thus associating it with nonmetric forms, and “structure” as a building-up effect following the accumulation of metric forms. This reveals the contradiction between structure and agency to be a case of forced perspective, leaving us victim to an optical illusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Sep 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030189839

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© The Author(s) 2019

J.-S. GuyTheory Beyond Structure and AgencyPalgrave Studies in Relational Sociologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18983-9_1

1. Introduction

Jean-Sébastien Guy¹  

(1)

Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

Jean-Sébastien Guy

Email: [e-mail]

This book seeks to develop a new pair of fundamental concepts in sociological theory for the purpose of scientific research: metric and nonmetric. This intellectual endeavor arises in reaction to the dissatisfaction caused by the problem of structure and agency.

As their discipline underwent a process of professionalization over the course of the twentieth century, sociologists were left with the task of unifying their ranks so as to achieve one ecumenical identity for themselves. As practitioners of the same discipline, sociologists had to confront the different ways they describe social reality. They settled for a weak compromise, contending that social reality is part structure and part agency: human beings living in social groups are said to be in control of their actions, while simultaneously constrained by the wider circumstances around them.

The common position within sociology is that complete determinism (privileging structure over agency) and complete voluntarism (privileging agency over structure) are both unsatisfactory. A better solution is to advocate the just middle. But while better than either determinism or voluntarism alone, this solution is still very bad in itself, since it comprises a mix of both determinism and voluntarism even though one is specifically the direct opposite of the other, so that mixing them is bound to create confusion on a conceptual and theoretical level.

I therefore assert that there is a need for new concepts in sociology, and that metric and nonmetric are precisely the concepts sociologists are in need of. The metric/nonmetric distinction avoids the problem raised by the structure/agency distinction simply because metric and nonmetric do not contradict each other like structure and agency do.

Since they cause no contradiction leading to a dead knot, the concepts of metric and nonmetric can be used to reconstitute social reality by foregrounding its internal variety. That is, metric and nonmetric are meant to describe the properties of different forms arising in social reality. Sociological analysis can proceed henceforward by looking into the many relations that can develop between forms.

Yet the development of new concepts is no small affair. It shall take the larger part of the book to complete this process. I have to ask my reader to be patient, which is apparently something that has recently become rather unreasonable in our accelerated culture, if not downright unrealistic. The reader can rest assured though: I am confident that his or her investment in attention and time will pay off in the end. I am one of those who believe that the world we live is a complex one, and that for this reason, we need an equally complex theory to describe this world adequately. Again, perhaps not something very fashionable in this day and age. Against these odds, I shall begin by offering a quick overview of the central ideas ahead.

1.1 From Structure and Agency to Metric and Nonmetric

Sociology as a scientific discipline studies human beings living in groups, that is, in the company of other human beings. What does this fundamental condition entail for the individuals involved?

Two points are worth mentioning. First, as members of the same group, individuals are likely to resemble each other in their manners of acting, thinking and feeling (this is Emile Durkheim’s main lesson). Indeed, the fact that many different individuals share the same tastes, beliefs, lifestyles or practices is taken as evidence of group-ness or social cohesion. Individuals are not merely passing by each other or passively standing next to each other like inanimate objects placed on a shelf. They actively interact together and inevitably develop meaningful social bonds. Second, life with others entails a division of labor (as Karl Marx taught us). This implies that group members are given different roles with distinct rights and obligations. Differences between roles not only separate individuals but unite them as well. In sum, social groups are more than just simple sets of basic elements since they display internal organization.

For many, the concept of structure is meant to indicate the organizational aspects of social groups. Individuals living in a group are not only accepted as normal members of that group: in addition, they occupy different positions within it. These positions determine the way individuals interact together: one individual may dominate the others or be dominated by them; some individuals may be expected to cooperate or to compete together; and so on. In this schema, the concept of structure implies that a constraint is exercised on the individuals who are part of the group. Quite simply, they are pressured to follow certain rules. Rules are meant to be obeyed, not broken or disregarded. For the group to continue to exist—or else for the group to continue to be recognizable by its own members—it is crucial to maintain the group’s structure, its organizational shape and the rules that come with it.

While the concept of structure typically underlines organizational aspects—positions and rules, along with their constraining effect, but also the long-term stability thus acquired—the concept of agency usually marks the limit of structure. Human beings are all members of one group or another and yet they remain capable of free initiatives, if only in principle. Human beings are not always following rules. There are times—there must be times—when they act out of their own will or their own judgment, which means that they can intervene on the structure of the group they are part of and change it, even if partially only.

Together, the concepts of structure and agency make up for a simple but pervasive model of social reality. Introducing the metric/nonmetric distinction in sociological theory will disrupt this model and replace it with a different one.

To begin sketching out this alternative model, let me develop the following points right away (for a previous introduction, see Guy 2017, 2019a):

1.

Rather than conceptualizing agency in opposition with structure, we can double it up, as it were, so as to allow for a relation between (one’s) agency and (someone else’s) agency. As a result of this, agency reappears as mundane (although not trivial) rather than heroic, or permanent rather than exceptional. It is not directed against social structures anymore, so that exercising agency no longer implies becoming an agent of change in history. Now anyone’s agency must be analyzed in combination or in parallel with the agency of many other individuals. Structures do not disappear out of the picture but reemerge as patterns of behavior, arising through the efforts conducted by these multiple individuals to coordinate themselves. In the rest of the text, I refer to these patterns as social forms.

2.

While the metric/nonmetric distinction is my own, I rely heavily on Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory to fully develop it (1990, 1995, 2012, 2013a, b; Guy 2018a, b). The reader must be therefore alerted to a handful of Luhmann’s core ideas: communication, social system and self-observation. Luhmann defines communication as the very process through which multiple individuals manage to achieve coordination. This process is never-ending in that the conditions of coordination are never secured once and for all. Punctual or instantaneous communications have no duration: they take place only to dissolve right away—and yet this is enough for laying the ground for the next operation of communication. While all operations of communication come to an end, each one of them plants the seed for the following one. In that sense, communication amounts to as self-perpetuating mechanism (what Luhmann calls autopoiesis, following Maturana and Varela). Communication sometimes dies out when the individuals involved simply stop trying to coordinate themselves. On the other hand, as long as the process stretches in time, Luhmann speaks of it as an ongoing social system. Social systems are chains of communications. Individuals are not part of such systems, nor are they directly constrained by them. Social systems are ecologically sustained or fed by the way multiple individuals (multiple agents) react to one another continuously. Finally, we can add that social systems are capable of self-observation to the extent that the communication process can be thematized from within the same process. Basically, the definition of a social situation occurs, and is periodically updated or reedited, through that same situation. Individuals can redirect the way they react to each other by taking into account their previous reactions. As they go through multiple rounds of interaction, they can develop an insight over their behavior so far, and they can express that insight during following rounds so as to implement it in their subsequent behavior.

3.

The metric/nonmetric distinction is meant to describe two different types of forms (patterns of behavior) that social systems come to create and sustain through the communication process, if momentarily only. The concept of form is borrowed from Luhmann’s theory like the other concepts mentioned earlier. Form is understood in contrast with medium. A medium is a mass of elements that are loosely coupled with each other. When some of these elements become tightly coupled, a form is created in the medium and out of it. Put differently, medium and form refer to the same material in different states: that material is non-organized or left disorganized in its medium-state, while it is organized in its form-state. While medium and form mark different states, they share the same substance. Forms emerge out of the medium until they are erased. This process—the creation and destruction of forms—leaves the medium itself untouched, so that new forms can still emerge even after older ones are erased. Any material allowing for both states and the variation between them qualifies as a potential medium, even though it might not be exploited as such. For Luhmann, the medium of communication is sense or meaning (this approach was first inspired by Husserl’s phenomenology). I modify this part of Luhmann’s theory so that the medium of communication is turned into an endless crowd of individuals. This is a metaphor of course since one cannot find an endless crowd on Earth. As a metaphor though, the crowd replicates the world since every living individual must be seen as already inside a crowd at all times, as always part of that crowd and as having to work with the conditions resulting from these circumstances. This is another way of saying that we live our existence among other people’s lives. Metric forms and nonmetric forms exist as certain arrangements or distributions of moving bodies within the crowd. These forms do not control individuals like social forces would do. However, the individuals attempting at coordinating themselves can mobilize these forms and take support on them in the course of their activities. Accordingly, the selection of forms, or their extraction out of the medium, intersects with the operations of social systems and, more precisely, with the operation of self-observation. In summary: through the operations of social systems, the medium is constantly reorganized; through this reshuffling, certain forms come into view as it were; and finally, social systems can take on the shape of these forms by espousing them through their next operations.

Metric forms and nonmetric forms are distinct inasmuch as they display different properties. This difference (or part of it) is inspired by certain aspects of Luhmann’s theory once again, so let me return to it by adding this other point:

4.

Whereas a lot of theories in sociology are based on a definition of individuals as human beings, this is not the case with Luhmann’s systems theory. As explained earlier, communication as a process leading to the formation of social systems kicks off when two individuals or more come in contact with each other so that none of them can go on his or her activities as if the others were simply not there. What is essential in this setting is not that all individuals can be described as identical as human beings, but more fundamentally that they are not the same person in each other’s eyes. You are not me and I am not you. This is why I cannot know ahead of time what you will do in reaction to my presence and vice versa. This is why both of us are faced with the challenge of having to do things together by making ourselves mutually predictable. This basic framework frees sociologists as external observers from the need to begin with a definition of what a human being might be (in terms of shared motivations, common goals, natural desires, general competences, universal limitations, etc.). Sociologists can leave this task to social systems. Put differently, all definitions of human being fall on the side of empirical reality, not on the side of sociological theory. Indeed, such definitions can be interpreted as self-observations. They are assembled in the course of communication as individuals struggle to make sense of the situation that they are in and the relation they have with each other, thus propelling social systems down their evolutionary paths. For this reason, these definitions are contingent. Not all social systems necessarily gravitate around one explicit definition of human beings. Some do, others do not.

These remarks provide me with the theoretical material I need to describe the properties of metric forms and nonmetric forms: whereas nonmetric forms implicate a definition of human being (an identity), either implicitly or explicitly, metric forms do not. Two last points will clarify this:

5.

Behind any nonmetric form is a principle of identity that acts as a mechanism dividing the numerous individuals making up the crowd into mutually exclusive categories: members and non-members, or insiders and outsiders. Identities are ascribed to individuals while individuals can claim these identities for themselves (or else reject them as false labels). This leaves other individuals around them with the opportunity or the obligation to define their own identities in reaction—as either with you or not with you; as a friend and an ally; or a stranger and an enemy; and so on. Through this game, all individuals end up taking on one identity or another. Whatever the outcome turns out to be, it is different from the crowd in its raw state. Accordingly, we have to make a distinction between before and after the identification effect: before, we already have a crowd made out of innumerable individuals, except that these individuals remain nameless or even faceless; after, individuals fuse with the identities that they have gained, now that they have become who they are, so that one individual and one individual’s identity refer to the same thing in the crowd. Thus, nonmetric forms remind us that identities are always a matter of social construction.

6.

Metric forms require no identity, they trigger no identification, so that individuals in the crowd are not divided into mutually exclusive categories. What is at stake is no longer the status of individuals, that is, how they perceive and position themselves vis-à-vis each other. For more precision, we must look into the engine of communication or what drives social systems. In the case of nonmetric forms, this is simple enough because an external observer who holds the individuals in the social situation can be held responsible for that situation since it revolves around their own identities as social constructions. Metric forms present us with a different case inasmuch as specific individuals can no longer be held responsible for these forms. The key word is specific. Social systems still depend on individuals in the crowd, but it does not follow that each system must be chained to one limited group of clearly identified individuals, as if Canadian politics or Western science were completely reducible to what Canadians do or what Westerners do, for instance. Some social systems mark an open zone in the middle of the crowd where multiple individuals are entering, while many others are leaving at the same time. These systems remain recognizable for what they are—as forms in the medium—even though the individuals caught in their operations are constantly changing through a turnover effect. In this perspective, Western science is more than just what Westerners do. Science is not really Western at all or else it does not have to be defined this way. Instead we can think about it in terms of knowledge production leading to more knowledge production like a series of waves riding on each other. This is not to say that science is the road toward infinite progress, but that changes in science can be seen as resulting not from the personal exploits of exceptional individuals, but from a process of diffusion, accumulation and saturation, with each new development paving the way for more developments. What matters is not who is doing science (in terms of, say, class, race or gender) but howscience functions independently of other social activities (like politics) by tapping into the fluctuations that it generates within itself. What is at stake is the possibility to conceive distinct social domains that can transform themselves over time, thanks to the variety or heterogeneity internal to them. In the case of science, that variety refers to the different methods, objects, theories or paradigms that different researchers happen to work with. Science changes when one method, one object, and so on, gains dominance over the other options. That there is variety or heterogeneity within one social domain means that the various options at hand can be compared or measured relatively to each other in light of a measuring scale particular to that domain. In science, we can say that there is a difference between big and small discoveries or between major and minor theories, and so on. This is not self-evident, of course. Indeed, scientific activities can be understood as efforts made at sorting out big discoveries from small ones, major theories from minor ones, and so on. Like collective and personal identities, big discoveries are a matter of social construction. But things like scientific discoveries do not imprint themselves in the crowd like identities do: they do not divide individuals symbolically, and they do not attach themselves to one of the two groups of individuals gathered on each side of the division lines. Things like scientific discoveries depend on a relay mechanism so that they can pass from one individual to the other. This last image can be turned around: it is not the discoveries (as knowledge, ideas, memes, etc.) that are moving or circulating, but the individuals in the crowd. Scientific activities can sustain themselves (along with their various methods, objects, theories, etc.) as long as individuals continue to enter and leave the open zone that these activities delineate in the crowd.

In summary, I take advantage of the fact that Luhmann’s theory is post-humanist (or even anti-humanist) in two complementary ways.

First, Luhmann’s theory allows me to make the strong argument that any definition of human beings (or humanity, humankind, mankind, etc.) must be a social (empirical) construction. As sociologists, we can still study individuals and how individuals interact together. But making sense of these phenomena in a sociological way does not require us to one common human nature ascribe to all these individuals as a necessary starting point (so as to endow the individuals under study with the capacities or powers that they must have logically to pursue the activities that they do). This is not to suggest that some of us are humans, whereas others are not (thus implying that some of us may be entitled to more privileges than others). This is not the moral idea that I have in mind here. The goal is to open up a different sociological approach. The standard approach consists in studying one individual, and then another one, and then another one, and so on, only to conclude retroactively that they are all the same as human beings (even though they may not treat each other with equal respect). The new approach that I want to experiment with in this book does not proceed in this way by considering only one individual at a time. Instead, we can envision an entire crowd right from the beginning—a sea of people—and move on by observing the patterns taking shape—that is, taking form—in this medium. We can then interpret the claims made about human nature or the quality of being human as embedded in some of these patterns, that is, as an identity projected onto the crowd, thus dividing the individuals inside of it into dual categories (like righteous men and evil men, great men and lesser men, decent human beings and indecent ones, normal human beings and sick ones, loving human beings and selfish ones, etc.). This mechanism provides the foundations for all nonmetric forms.

Second, Luhmann shows us a way to account for social phenomena that does not fall back on the personal characteristics of individuals, starting with agency. The preceding paragraph creates a void somehow: researchers are instructed not to explain social phenomena by referring back to human beings because what a human being is and how to achieve one’s humanity and who is human and who is not are already social phenomena. But how to differentiate up from down from here on? How to fall back on our feet? We can recover our sense of direction and our sense of balance by embracing Luhmann’s concepts of communication and social system. If science is a social system, to stick with this example, then it is not under the control of scientists. The latter participate in science, in scientifically coded communication, which means that none of them acts as if she was all alone just by herself. Scientists do not always cooperate together; they can compete with each other just as well. The point is that any one of them does what she does in coordination with others. Moreover, science goes on even as old scientists retire and younger colleagues take over. Hence, a social system exists, not as a collection of players, but as a series of events recursively folding on each other, and it continues to exist as the events triggered so far precipitate still more events. It is this principle that allows me to conceive metric forms in addition to nonmetric forms.

At this point, it is clear that the structure/agency distinction and the metric/nonmetric distinction lead to divergent models of reality. One major difference is that, in the first distinction, the individual endowed with agency is depicted as alone in front of structures. In reality, there is more than just one single individual, needless to say. However, the structure/agency distinction is such that it does not reflect this crucial fact with sufficient clarity. Put the other way around, the structure/agency distinction forces the observer to neglect, ignore or suspend the difference there is between one individual and another, since agency must be endowed to all of them as human beings. Yet it is a fact that I am not you, and you are not me. This is not to say that one cannot grant agency to both of us. On the contrary, this is a given: you have agency as much as I do—and this is exactly what makes you unpredictable to me while I remain unpredictable to you. For this reason, agency must be turned against itself: my agency against yours and vice versa.

This is the motive behind Luhmann’s systems theory: not to make individuals disappear by replacing them with systems, but to deploy the concept of system as a way to capture the complexity that is created within interactions between individuals. The development of both metric and nonmetric forms follows from these fundamental principles as individuals come to learn to dance together through trials and errors. In summary, the structure/agency distinction leads us to assume that individuals lack freedom—that they have yet to conquer their freedom by exercising their agency against the structures around them—whereas the metric/nonmetric distinction privileges an entirely different problematic: it is not that you are lacking freedom or that you do not have enough of it, but on the contrary, that you have too much freedom or more exactly that the freedom you have is too much for the others around you to handle and reciprocally.

I should add that the theoretical framework sketched out in this book bears some resemblance with the strategic-relational approach previously developed by Bob Jessop (2001, 2005, 2008; see also Hay 2002). Like me (and many others before me), Jessop expresses his dissatisfaction with the structure/agency distinction. He takes notes of the previous critiques formulated by Anthony Giddens, Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer, but cannot find contentment with their solutions. Jessop moves the distinction between structure and agency from theoretical heights to empirical ground, notably by underlining more forcefully their spatial and temporal properties. In this way, Jessop can relativize the way structure impacts agency and vice versa.

In other words, the question of structure and agency is no longer answered sub specie aeternitatis. For Jessop, structures as much as agencies come in many different forms and sizes. Moreover, structures and agencies are irreducibly plural and diverse. Any structure exists amid many other structures and in interaction with them (Jessop 2001: 1221, 1230). Thus, Jessop envisions a deep ecology of structures. This concrete multitude of co-existing and coevolving structures is the trick for effectively relativizing the relation between structure and agency.

Structures are different from each other inasmuch as they impact agents or agencies differently. Jessop relies on the concept of strategic selectivity to make this point. Any structure is tied to a specific context and through that context to certain social activities and historical projects. Any structure therefore tends to reinforce certain aspects of that context. Consequently, among all the various actions, meanings and identities made available to agents, some are made easier or more rewarding than others. This leaves agents with the challenge (or task) of strategic calculation. To the extent that agents are faced with multiple structures, they can determine their behaviors by mobilizing or finding support on certain structures, while resisting some other structures or keeping them at bay. Jessop summarizes [this] implies that the self-same element(s) can operate as a structural constraint for one agent (or set of agents) and as conjunctural opportunities liable to transformation by another agent (or set of agents). It also implies that a short-term structural constrain for a given agent (or set of agents) could become a conjunctural opportunities over a longer time horizon or even within the same time horizon if there is a shift in strategy (2008: 42).

Like social agents, social structures exist in time and space inasmuch as they are attached to a specific context or meta-context (context of context), which amounts to a structured coherence or patterned incoherence. Yet this is not enough: structures are merely located or contained in time and space; rather, they embody time and space. That is, they create their own time and space. Jessop speaks of various temporalities and spatialities that structures give expression to as their own properties, be it as distanciation or compression effect, horizons of action, rhythms of activities, and so on (Jessop 2001: 1227). The overall set (the structured coherence or patterned incoherence) remains forever dynamic: structures and agencies are connected dialectically so that the way agencies act under the conditions created by structures impacts the latter, considering that (1) not all structures are identical and (2) structures are interacting with each other all along.

The similarities with my own model lie in the way Jessop multiplies social structures to allow for relations among structures mediated by agents (in the same way, structures mediate relations among agents, since different structures are conducive to different strategies, thus privileging different actors or at least different courses of actions at the expense of others). In addition, there are similarities in the fact that both Jessop and I explicitly imbue social structures with strong spatial and temporal features. In this regard, though, Jessop’s formulation is not as powerful as it could be. In any case, I believe the concepts of metric and nonmetric will help in bringing a higher degree of theoretical precision.

In the end, though, one important difference remains between Jessop and me. By seeking to improve on the structuration theory (Giddens ), critical realism (Bhaskar ) and morphogenetic theory (Archer ), Jessop really tries to bridge the gap between structure and agency in concrete (non-rhetorical) fashion. Thus, Jessop’s thinking continues to gravitate around questions like how do structures intersect with action? and how can agent transform structures? My own objective is to decouple structure and agency or else to shift away from the central axis that they constitute. Among other things, by making a distinction between metric and nonmetric forms, I demonstrate how metric from can impact other metric forms, thereby bypassing the relation between structure and agency as privileged heuristic devise for conceptualizing social change.

1.2 Preliminary Lessons from the Sociology of Globalization

The reader might want to know that the ideas developed in this book find their origins (indirectly at least) in my previous work on globalization (Guy 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2016) for which I made extensive use of Luhmann’s systems theory. My objective was to demonstrate that globalization is best understood as a self-description of society. Since globalization is something that actors thematize themselves and discuss with others in the course of their own interactions, I figured I should avoid determining what globalization is or is not in an a priori manner. A better strategy was to observe the observer as Luhmann puts it (Luhmann 2002; Fuchs 2001; Akerstrom Andersen 2003).

Sociologists are observers themselves, yet their role is not to tell other observers what to observe, that is, to instruct them on what there is to observe in reality. Rather, the role of a sociologist is to observe how other observers produce their own observations. For example, sociologists can study religion as a social phenomenon, but this does not require them to believe in God (or gods) themselves or to share the same creed as their research participants. As researchers, sociologists are free to remain agnostic: they do not have to prove that religious faith is necessarily false or scientifically invalid, nor do they have to demonstrate that it is rigorously true or acceptable. It is enough for them to observe that there is something like religion happening in social reality. The task waiting to be done is to decipher the inner functioning of this phenomenon. The point is not to intervene as experts to inform believers that they are simply mistaken (or conversely that nonbelievers have lost their ways and must be saved), but to understand how religion offers a position in the world from which the rest of the world can then be observed. How does religion (or this one religion, in particular) produce its own observation? How are these observations generated concretely?

Observing the observer is second-order observing. We must direct our attention on the observer and the operations of observations carried out by that observer. We are not interested in reality as it is when abandoned to itself—reality in the complete absence of any observer—but in reality as it is processed by one observer in particular. The observer does not distort Reality (with a capital R), but create reality: its own reality. Put differently, what we call reality is an eventful affair: unlike God, it does not exist in all eternity, not as an eternal order, but through a series of operations. The organization of reality therefore begins with the organization of these operations. Luhmann explains that the production of an operation can only occur within a network of similar operations, that is, within a self-referential system. The production of (one) reality implicates the co-production of one system capable of sustaining observations about (that) reality.

The superposition between system and reality only takes place for the system observing that reality. Everything a system knows about reality must be established through that system’s observations as operations conducted inside that system. This is to say that the system grounds itself by taking its observations of reality for reality itself. Still, a distinction between reality and observation of reality and a distinction between reality and observer are maintained at all times. These distinctions remind observers that mistakes can happen sometimes, that the observation of reality can turn out to be incorrect in the immediate circumstances, an incident that then triggers the need for more observations in an effort to verify or double-check the observations previously conducted. These distinctions also remind observers that the reality they observe could be observed otherwise. In this way, observers can conceive that, in the reality that they observe, there could be other observers different than them. Rather than forcing their reality or their way of constructing reality on others, observers might want to investigate how these different observers conceive and experience reality from their own perspectives.

In my work on globalization, I explained that knowledge of globalization does not come from our senses, but from the communications circulating within society as a social system. As one specific topic or theme of discussion, globalization is a way for society to address the state that the system is currently in. Globalization is not real by itself. Rather, it is made real by society through the operations produced inside the system. Additionally, it is made real for society’s own benefits so as to provide society with a coordinate system of sorts, if temporally only.

Having formulated this central hypothesis about the nature of globalization, I moved on by setting up an empirical research program revolving around the historical and cultural elaboration of this particular coordinate system, at least in a sketchy manner. My aim was to delineate globalization by approaching it from the outside. Using a comparative method, I examined what distinguishes globalization from other coordinate systems (Guy 2013, 2016).

I was not interested in determining society’s (or the world’s) immediate situation in time. Unlike many other researchers, for instance, I was not interested in measuring the current